It is a bright and shiny new day

So long, Comcast - see you in hell, you unhelpful jackals.

While I subscribe to the idea that in many cases the devil you know is better than the devil you don't, a quick search of Consumerist.com shows 8 hits for "RCN" and 381 for "Comcast" so I'm willing to take the risk.

The kicker is that when we moved to Minnesota, we were happy to set up an account with anyone other than Comcast after the installation (and disconnection) issues we'd had at our old apartment. When that company was sold to Comcast, we started complaining immediately, but were given a direct number to a customer service rep who took good care of us.

Honestly, it seems that Comcast's biggest issue is that they hire awful contractors who come in, dirty up homes, break things and never get the installs quite right. This has been our experience in two Comcast installs and this was only made worse when I started working in the A/V install industry and knew just how simple cable pulls can be with enough time. Comcast seems to rarely leave enough time.

I'll spare you our personal tales of woe, but the break point for us has been the awful Internet service. While we haven't seen any blocking that we're aware of, we have a daily reboot that required to keep the pipeline chugging along. In a moderately wired apartment - two laptops, two networked TiVos, an Xbox 360 and other devices clamoring for bandwidth at times during day and night - something is making the wireless router barf once a day, without any real predictability.

It's also fun when the wireless drops to local only in the middle of doing things, so while a once a day restart doesn't sound like the end of the world - and let's face it, it's light years beyond the old days of AOL dial up - that constant annoyance is enough to make a customer nuts when the bloated bill comes due.

It's a happy accident that RCN sent along word that our neighborhood is now within their network during the same week that I had to pirate our neighbors' signal for our league's fantasy baseball draft because I simply don't trust Comcast anymore. When you reach the point that their most in-depth tech support is someone telling you to unplug the wireless router from the surge protector and into the wall because sometimes it needs a power boost, it's time to look somewhere else for your cable and Internet needs.

So, fresh off the phone with RCN, I'm feeling positive this morning and can honestly say that they can do no worse. With all the cabling already run, I can almost guarantee that they won't ding up the walls or drill any bonus holes into our floors.

Here's a bonus for the Minnesota faithful - the number for the person in the Minnesota region who might actually be able to help you with Comcast's reign of crappy service.

(Image from Consumerist.com)